Aaaaaaand they're off (Tel Aviv to San Francisco)

At long last, the first installment in my very overdue travelogue.(The really interesting stuff will start with the next entry, this is the travel itself that I'm logging for posterity. No idea why, it wasn't that interesting, but now that I've started I feel obligated to follow through...)

Itai and I left the house at the unholy hour of 3am for our 5:30am flight from Tel Aviv to Frankfurt. Itai started this trip off the way he'd remain throughout - unbelievably cool and cooperative. He literally bounced out of bed at 3am and got ready so fast we were ready early! He was so excited to leave that he insisted we go downstairs to wait for the taxi 15 minutes early. Our flight from TA was pretty uneventful. Our only (fairly minor) hassles were the fact that our original seats were in completely separate rows (easily dealt with), that we'd forgotten to order him a kid's meal (he managed to choke down a pretty inedible adult one) and the fact that the movie they showed was Rocky Balboa. Great, show an overly excited 6 year old a boxing movie - I spent hours after that trying to get him to stop pretending to punch.

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We had just a 1 hour layover in Frankfurt before boarding the next flight - this one to NY. This flight was completely uneventful. Itai slept nearly the whole time, and even I, who never ever sleeps on planes, managed a few hours. After a 2 or 3 hour layover in NY, we boarded our final flight of the day to San Francisco. And sat on the tarmac for another 2.5 hours as storms rolled through, shutting down all of Kennedy Airport for a few hours. The pilot didn't want to let us off since we were #2 in the queue and he knew if we lost our spot we'd be stuck hours longer as they started dealing with the inbound flights from Europe, but they were good about serving drinks and showing movies to pass the time. We were getting a bit punchy by this point, but it wasn't too bad.

We finally arrived in SF at about 10pm, met up with Jay's aunt and uncle, and discovered that Maya's carseat, which we'd checked as baggage, had not made the flight with us. Luckily we didn't nead it until the following morning.

The next morning I had brunch with my boss and a coworker, finally meeting them face to face, and then it was time to head to the airport to pick up the rest of the family, who as you can see were quite happy to be reunited. (You can also see from the picture that Maya's seat showed up the following day. Unfortunately, Jay's suitcase did not, yet again SFO had lost our luggage...)

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